Hitting the mixed music road

‘Local Andromeda – a Journey on Route 6’ goes into high gear at the Oud Festival.

Hitting the mixed music road.
(photo credit:Courtesy)

There are generally plenty of cultural confluences on offer at the Oud Festival,
and this year’s 10-dayer is following suit. Ronen Shapira’s “Local Andromeda – a
Journey on Route 6” (Confederation House, November 15) is one of the more
intriguing interethnic encounters and incorporates a musical and physical
interface between musicians with different cultural backgrounds. The concert
features two Jewish and two Arab members of the Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra.

Shapira, on pianos, will be joined by Yossi Arnheim on flute,
Sami Hashibun on Arab violin and oud player Michael Marun.

For Shapira,
music feeds off life, and life reflects the music. His mention of the highway in
the work’s title is a case in point. “When you drive along Route 6, which
straddles the area of the Green Line, you have Palestinians on one side and
Israelis on the other, but you just drive along and there is no real encounter
with the Palestinians. You pass by a village, but you don’t really see
it.”

Shapira doesn’t just talk about bringing the cultures together, he
embodies that encounter in his work and in his life.

“Look, I was born in
north Tel Aviv near where all sorts of prime ministers lived,” he states. “I
didn’t grow up playing Arabic music or anything out of my natural cultural
sphere. I grew up with disco and pop and classical music, but I am naturally
rebellious. I started listening to Arabic music – I heard a cassette of
[Egyptian diva] Oum Kalthoum, and I thought it was amazing and so complex.
Eventually I got around to thinking about fusing east and west, and people told
me I couldn’t do it. When I am told I can’t do something, I go ahead and
try. That’s my way.”

Indeed, Shapira immersed himself in Western
classical music, first studying piano with his mother, Hava Shapira, before
going on to attend the music academy at Tel University, where he benefited from
the rich experience and polished teaching skills of such luminaries as Pnina
Zaltzman and Leah Agmon. He also studied composition with Andre Hajdu and Joseph
Dorfman and completed a master’s degree and a doctorate in the US. That’s quite
an educational resumé on the European side of the classical tracks.

In
the intervening two decades, however, he has spread his musical wings far and
wide. He has worked with artists from a wide range of genres, including rockers
Berry Sakharof, Yahli Toren and Doron Solomon, besides collaborations with
leading members of the classical domain such as conductor Noam Sherif and
composer Michael Volpeh. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall and the
Bela Bartok National Concert Hall in Budapest and, last August, his Untempered
Opera, based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, was performed in Tokyo.
Add to that his role as a founding member of the domain, and you get a pretty
comprehensive musical ethos. So when he talks about exploring and embracing
music from all kinds of cultural climes, you know he knows what he’s on
about.

While Shapira may have a point about one side not seeing – or
hearing – the other side, it may just come down to the simple fact that our ears
tend to be more receptive to the sounds and rhythms with which we grew
up.

“It’s true that as human beings, we are limited,” Shapira observes,
“but we still have the ability to take new things on board. In my experience, if
you hear something that is initially unfamiliar, over a period of time you
develop a memory of it and it becomes part of you.”

That, says, Shapira
was something his Japanese colleagues appreciated last summer. “I took an Arabic
tuned organ and combined it with a piano, and I messed around with all sorts of
scales, untempered tunings and quartertones. I mixed Oriental scales and things
I made up, and they said that after a few days of hearing the scales, they
sounded completely natural to them. There is an infinite number of things you
can do in music.”

Last year, Shapira’s Taximcerto concerto was performed
by the IPO, with Revital Hachamoff playing two pianos – one Western tuned and
one Middle Eastern tuned, to accommodate the quartertones that, for example, oud
players produce. Shapira will also play similarly tuned pianos at his Oud
Festival concert next week.

And the composer-pianist is not afraid to
ruffle a few purist feathers. “You can’t stay closed up in your own
world,” he says. “I find that idea depressing. But I see people like Berry
Sakharof doing all sorts of [cross-cultural] things, and that’s great. There are
some good things happening in this country.”

The Oud Festival certainly
offers some evidence of that exploratory endeavor.

For tickets and more
information about the Oud Festival: (02) 624-5207 ext. 4 and
www.confederationhouse.org